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Goodness! It's almost as if game designers have a habit of showing characters doing incredible things in cutscenes which they then mysteriously lose the ability to do in the actual game! :P

yeah, I know. It just seems especially misleading with Jack because she's very much portrayed as an attacker. Not really someone you'd choose to shield your team (also, she wasn't even mentioned in the dialogue bit where you choose, at least not in my game).

It's so much easier than Impossible I really had to check if I chose Normal by mistake. But no it's Classic. Did they make game easier in the past month? Rolling almost without casualties, destroying everything, even base defence went smoothly and now I'm nearing the end of the game, future is looking bright for once.

This base def mission was easier then the last one though. No ethereal this time. There were plenty of everything else of course. One floater, 5 mechtoids, 4 cyberdiscs, 3 drones, 3 chryssalids, 4 berserkers, 2 mutons, 11 sectoids and 5 sectoid commanders. At least three security guards survived. Last time I needed a miracle( and it happened), this time only a couple of lucky hits and misses.

I found Classic to be either easy but boring/tedious, or exciting but impossible. I have real problems considering it to be a good game for that reason-it doesn't really manage to marry it's theme with game play. There's no real risk/reward thing I don't think, becuase of the alien uncovering mechahinc. If you advance as a turtle very slowly you'll experience few problems becuase you'll rarely encounter more than twice your number, and if you try a more dynamic approach you'll uncover tens of dudes in a corner and get whomped. There's no real value in playing anything other than slow and steady apart from to add some narrative jazz, but that comes at the expense of massivley sub-optimal gameplay and is incredibly artificial.

Goodness! It's almost as if game designers have a habit of showing characters doing incredible things in cutscenes which they then mysteriously lose the ability to do in the actual game! :P

EDIT: Whoops, missed Skalpadda basically saying the exact same thing, although I'm not sure I would have said RPGs were especially prone to it - most critics seemed to refer to it as God of War syndrome or the like, IIRC.

It may just be that I've played too many RPGs. I think the worst example I've seen is Guild Wars 2 where lots of the story quests and dungeons have you accompanying supposedly very powerful NPCs, some presented as being of the world-saving-hero persuasion, yet they invariably get killed and need to be revived after every single trash pull.

Between the new Hundle and a newly activated Playstation Plus subscription, I've been pretty busy with new games.

Joe Danger 2: This seems like the sort of game where my completionist-autism will prevent me from ever finishing. Shame, the artwork is incredibly charming.

Bit.Trip Runner 2: Ditto Joe Danger. Barely an improvement upon the first game, down to re-used music and sound assets. I turned off V-Sync in an attempt to mitigate the stuttering that was killing me, but this game has the absolute worst screen tearing I've ever encountered.

Galaga Legions DX: Galaga re-imagined as a twin-stick shooter. I think it's absolutely brilliant, and if it's in any way indicitive of Pac-Man CEDX's quality I'm going to end up grabbing that in a Steam sale.

Uncharted 3: After binging on AssFlag, the climbing puzzles and melee combat in this game are a joy. Sadly, after playing Vanquish and Binary Domain, every other cover shooter is a chore.
Dyad: Jeff Minter's Audiosurf. I'm terrible at it.
Starbound: I like the concept, but scrounging for minerals is an absolute chore. I'm sure this is mitigated later on, but if they're just going to keep wiping my character I'll probably wait until it's either complete or they at least stop wiping. I don't know how well I'd get on with this if I'd actually put some time into Terraria; it just seems like Terraria with some wholesome layers of depth.

Far Cry 3: After the Ubi-standard opening slog of tutorials and unlocking otherwise-basic functionality — again — I'm finally having some fun with this game. Starting to get the urge to give FC2 another shot, though.

Uncharted 3: After binging on AssFlag, the climbing puzzles and melee combat in this game are a joy. Sadly, after playing Vanquish and Binary Domain, every other cover shooter is a chore.

Vanquish I get - oh, how I miss that game - but Binary Domain? Seriously? There were some neat touches, like taking robots to pieces, but I thought it was largely a pretty workmanlike slog. Honestly, I always quite liked Uncharted's gunplay (far more so than Gears of War) and it was far more the godawful story and sense of over-familiarity in #3 that killed it for me.

EDIT: Also, melee combat? Who uses melee combat in an Uncharted game? If you find yourself hammering out that combo even once it's a sign you did something wrong. :p

It may just be that I've played too many RPGs. I think the worst example I've seen is Guild Wars 2 where lots of the story quests and dungeons have you accompanying supposedly very powerful NPCs, some presented as being of the world-saving-hero persuasion, yet they invariably get killed and need to be revived after every single trash pull.

This is nearly always the case with most games which feature this illustrious Hero of the Age, so illustrious that they nearly always requite you to chum alongside them and do pretty much everything. It's just lazy writing, because either the mechanical reality is that this isn't the case at all, and it's just narrative fluff which exists apart from the game, or they are actually very powerful but their powers are arbitrarily limited in order that you follow certain tropes which would be broken if said power was applied to them.

What's worse is that you're often presented next to them as the sort of everyman whereas it's you who is basically immortal. Dragon Age, for all that I love it, was terrible for this after a certain point. My mere existence towards the end of my second play through should have been something which caused existential terror to the whole of Thedas, this man who could single-handedly kill Dragons and clear the Deep Roads on account of his mastery with daggers and whose dexterity was so impressive he couldn't even be hit by the majority of foes. Of course I was going to slay the Archdemon, and anything else for that matter.

One of the strengths of the Witcher Games I think is that you're explicitly made out to be super powerful from the get go, and everything is catered around that fact, something which grants a lot of verisimilitude.

Saints Row IV is another great example in that it lets you and your pals be super powered, and the game is fully transparent about how ordinary and impotent everything is around you in comparison and lets you have that fantasy full on and truly break reality as tends to be experienced in most third person games, rather than limiting it to token moments and exposition.

Vanquish I get - oh, how I miss that game - but Binary Domain? Seriously? There were some neat touches, like taking robots to pieces, but I thought it was largely a pretty workmanlike slog. Honestly, I always quite liked Uncharted's gunplay (far more so than Gears of War) and it was far more the godawful story and sense of over-familiarity in #3 that killed it for me.

EDIT: Also, melee combat? Who uses melee combat in an Uncharted game? If you find yourself hammering out that combo even once it's a sign you did something wrong. :p

All cover shooters really needed was something to shoot at. I'm bored with killing dudes, bring on the robots.

Who gives a shit about story in video games? Not me, so long as they run the gamut from "painfully bad" to "kill me now please." And if you thought BD was a slog, you weren't pissing off your teammates enough.

Who gives a shit about story in video games? Not me, so long as they run the gamut from "painfully bad" to "kill me now please." And if you thought BD was a slog, you weren't pissing off your teammates enough.

Yes, I do remember you're not one for story. I just meant that since I am and the story in Uncharted 3 was absolutely terrible by any standards it was that which really killed the game for me, not shotting mans or anything mechanical.

Not sure what you mean about BD. I don't mean a slog as in it was tough. Other than a couple of mildly tricky boss fights I didn't find it much of a challenge. I just never felt it ever really came to life - I don't get the whole "Oh, I'm plugging robots in the head now? Hey, this is cool!" thing. Nothing about them being robots ever really affected the game - after a few hours they might as well have been metal dudes with weird attack patterns and some amusing animations if you shot them in the right place. Battles never played out in any especially interesting ways for me, or rewarded any one plan of action more than any other. Most of it was just a monotonous bang, bang, bang, you're dead, with my teammates constantly worshiping me like unto a god for doing the simplest things.

I enjoyed it up to a point - the storytelling was painfully dumb, but it used a few themes I like in my SF and that mainstream videogames haven't really touched on much, and while the level design struck me as pretty average there were a few neat visual moments. But Vanquish just basically flattened it in pretty much every respect, IMO. That game was a deeply under-rated release that was great fun if you were just playing it as a Gears/CoD knockoff, and which turned into something sublime once you worked out the "right" way to play it. (We should be getting that on PC, not Metal Gear bloody Revengeance.) BD was, to me, passable entertainment for a rainy day, but a hugely disappointing misfire coming from Team Yakuza, so I'm just surprised to see anyone mention them in the same sentence.

I enjoyed it up to a point - the storytelling was painfully dumb, but it used a few themes I like in my SF and that mainstream videogames haven't really touched on much, and while the level design struck me as pretty average there were a few neat visual moments. But Vanquish just basically flattened it in pretty much every respect, IMO. That game was a deeply under-rated release that was great fun if you were just playing it as a Gears/CoD knockoff, and which turned into something sublime once you worked out the "right" way to play it. (We should be getting that on PC, not Metal Gear bloody Revengeance.) BD was, to me, passable entertainment for a rainy day, but a hugely disappointing misfire coming from Team Yakuza, so I'm just surprised to see anyone mention them in the same sentence.

*shrug* I only played the game in small doses, it's certainly not something I'd marathon and if you played it like that I can understand the fatigue. The dumb storytelling — much like Jericho — satisfied a morbid fascination for D-level scripts for me, and it clearly was self-aware enough to run with it (unlike DmC, which seems to think it's incredibly clever.) My team thought I was the absolute scum of the earth because I went out of my way to say the most offensive thing possible — to hilarious ends — in every single dialogue section. They never made a noticeable difference in combat anyway. It felt like Sega forced Team Yakuza to do a cover shooter, and they made the best of a bad committee decision. Although the existence of Dead Souls kind of calls that theory into question.

And yes, blowing the limbs off of robots and seeing the "amusing animations" did go a long way to mitigate the boredom. The actual shooting wasn't anything special.

The dumb storytelling — much like Jericho — satisfied a morbid fascination for D-level scripts for me, and it clearly was self-aware enough to run with it (unlike DmC, which seems to think it's incredibly clever.)

I'll just follow this thread a little longer, since I'm bor- uh, since it's touching on something near and dear to my heart. No, seriously, though, while I liked DmC's story - non-ironically - I completely agree it barely demonstrates a shred of awareness, if that, of how dumb it arguably comes off, for all its good intentions. But I still think Binary Domain, though also dumb, did something fairly brave for a videogame in tackling the whole (spoilered just in case...) "What makes someone human, anyway?" question. One of my favorite quotes from a populist work of SF is a line in the original Ghost in the Shell, where someone says (paraphrased) "If we could make robots that looked and acted exactly like humans, right down to the smallest detail, then they wouldn't be robots, they'd be humans". I think it's a worthy subject to take on, however well-trodden the same ground might be in other creative mediums, and even if Binary Domain explores it with all the wit and subtlety of you and your buddies drunkenly quoting Die Hard movies I still want to give it credit for trying. BD at least tries to make the jump (even if it crashes straight into the bar in a spectacular wipeout), for all I didn't think much of it as a game. Jericho never even bothered.

"I wonder what that thing over there with one eye and two legs is. I might be seeing things, I am pretty hungry. Better go hit it just to make sure." - Sir Buckly Adventureton the First moments before death.

"Halo is designed to make the player think "I look like that, I am macho sitting in my undies with my xbox""

yeh, I wish they'd stop that. Jack's intro was a pretty good example of that; bashing through mechs and all, and then when you use her on your team, she can't do much.
Not sure how they should do it, though.

Really, they just shouldn't. If you haven't made a game where clever use of your powers can obliterate your foes, don't show anybody wielding that sort of power. Have them doing something clever instead. It's not that hard. If you absolutely must, show it being an exceptional and ill-chosen thing to do, by inflicting some manner of strong negative consequence on the character that the player can exploit/rescue them from, to justify not just busting out the superpowers the moment things get hairy.

Hopping back and forth between Tomb Raider, Dead Space 3, Skyrim, and BF4 on my PC. Thoroughly enjoying The Last of Us when the TV is free, and Zelda: A Link Between Worlds when I have to use the bathroom.

"What were we talking about? Pegasuses, pegasii, that's horses with wings. This motherf*cker got a sword that talks to him. Motherf*cker live in places that don't exist, it comes with a map. My God."

I'm revisiting Hard Reset, on easy difficulty, and aside from a few obstinate jumping puzzles and that un-dodgeable charge attack one of the enemies has I'm having a great old time. The story is certainly nothing special, but the graphic novel-style interludes are aesthetically pleasing and quite effective at times. Reminiscent of Max Payne, unsurprisingly. A lot of idiotic exposition from the actual characters though. You'd think that the makers of an otherwise quite sublime experience would realize that less is often more.

I'm revisiting Hard Reset, on easy difficulty, and aside from a few obstinate jumping puzzles and that un-dodgeable charge attack one of the enemies has I'm having a great old time. The story is certainly nothing special, but the graphic novel-style interludes are aesthetically pleasing and quite effective at times. Reminiscent of Max Payne, unsurprisingly. A lot of idiotic exposition from the actual characters though. You'd think that the makers of an otherwise quite sublime experience would realize that less is often more.

You can negate the charge with the secondary attack from about half the weapons... Shotgun or the energy equivalent are aprobably the easiest and most readily-available.

The story becomes absolutely incomprehensible for techno-gibberish and f-bombs by the third act. I found myself wishing I had just skipped every cutscene, because the action crescendos into something sublime right around the time you grab the rail gun.

Men of War: Assault Squad co-op skirmish is great fun, but the "player with the fewest units receives the reinforcements no matter who bought them" system is just bizarre and annoying. Players can give units to each other, but it's unfortunate to need this workaround.

I played around 40 hours of TOME 4 on my first two characters (bulwark, archmage), expiring (permanently) at levels 25 and 30. It eventually becomes weirdly flat feeling, being entirely about combat and ability/equipment evaluation and lacking traditional roguelike resource management. The sheer amount of attrition makes boredom more dangerous than the majority of what you encounter, and I can't help feeling that it's missing something as a result.

Ten hours of the Starbound beta was enough to convince me that it's not quite there yet, though promising, and I'm reluctant to invest more time before the final character wipe. For a game that's so similar to Terraria, it just isn't as enjoyable in the fundamentals of movement and combat and exploration, and I have misgivings about the linear progression structure.

I "won" Proteus in around an hour, and I suppose I got my $2 worth. There are a couple interactions I didn't figure out, but I still have some ideas. Hopefully there are some more nuances to discover when I return to it. A pleasant diversion.

I've quite fallen in love with Nihilumbra. It's a small game and as far as I know, it was originally for mobile devices. (Don't quote me on that) For some reason, it helps me on a personal level as the game keeps telling the player how he/she is useless and worthless. It's not a long game by a long shot, and honestly, I've been passing it by when I feel like it, playing one world at a time, spending about half an hour doing just that, but hey, the game allows you to jump in and out of it, so why not make use of it?

Really, they just shouldn't. If you haven't made a game where clever use of your powers can obliterate your foes, don't show anybody wielding that sort of power. Have them doing something clever instead. It's not that hard. If you absolutely must, show it being an exceptional and ill-chosen thing to do, by inflicting some manner of strong negative consequence on the character that the player can exploit/rescue them from, to justify not just busting out the superpowers the moment things get hairy.

What annoyed me the most is that my Biotic Shepard never uses his power in cutscene, that's sloppy from bioware !